The Chosen

by Chaim Potok

This was the latest of a growing list of terrorist activities against the British Army in Palestine. While the Irgun engaged in terror—blowing up trains, attacking police stations, cutting communications lines—the Haganah continued smuggling Jews through the British naval blockade in defiance of the British Colonial Office, which had sealed Palestine off to further Jewish immigration. Rarely did a week go by now without a new act of terror against the British. My father would read the newspaper accounts of these activities, and I could see the anguish in his eyes. He hated violence and bloodshed and had an intense distaste for the terrorist policy of the Irgun, but he hated the British nonimmigration policy even more. Irgun blood was being shed for the sake of a future Jewish state, and he found it difficult to give voice to his feelings of opposition to the acts of terror that were regularly making front-page headlines now. Invariably, the headlines spurred him on to new bursts of Zionist activity and to loud, excited justification of the way he was driving himself in his fund-raising and speechmaking efforts in behalf of a Jewish state.